Category Archives: Recipes

Figs are the sexiest fruit. Aside from their feminine shape and sweet, squishy interior, they’re sexy because they’re elusive, at least in these parts. The New England–grown figs I’ve eaten have been dry and disappointing. A good, ripe fig spews its jellied guts when you take a bite. I guess there’s an exception to the “better local” rule.

But California figs, if you can get your hands on them, are awfully good. My favorite variety of those I’ve been able to try isn’t the slinky purple Black Mission Fig, but the green Kadota. I can eat only one at a time; they’re diminutive but their sweetness is concentrated and it goes right to my head. That’s why I never use them in desserts; they can’t take the sugar.

I didn’t make it up to Maine this summer. Maybe that means summer didn’t happen, because Maine is the state of summer for New Englanders. It’s the capital of summer for those who’ve grown tired of The Cape, a reward for those who can will themselves to drive past that scary and confusing state called New Hampshire. It’s a place where the clearness of the water makes up for its frigid temps. For out-of-towners like me, it seems to exist only for vacation (it’s called Vacationland, after all); it’s a place to go, not a place to stay—weekend Xanax, essentially. Maine has all the chill.

Besides “chill,” when I think about Maine, I think about my mom, not because she’s chill—I’m a product of a chill-less family—but because I spent many summer days there when I was a child, with just her. She worked weekends and nights and so I had a gift many other kids didn’t (or, they did, because we were misplaced shit-eaters in a town where no one seemed to have to work): a summer vacation adventure partner. Tuesdays were usually our big day, and we wouldn’t make it past Ogunquit—a day is only so long—but we had the best time driving with the windows open, baking and snoring on the beach, absolutely ruling at paddle ball, and eating cliché Maine blueberry confections, most frequently a slice of blueberry pie at The Goldenrod in York. That’s why cool vanilla ice cream melting into a dark purple sea of molten blueberries is my madeleine, and my favorite taste of summer.

I’d eaten red fruits, covered with crunchy minuscule seeds and topped with a green leaf collar my whole life. Big and firm, their flavor ranged from mild and watery to puckeringly tart, any time of the year. They had white cores and fuzzy hollow centers. They came in plastic containers labeled “strawberries,” and I thought they were my favorite fruit. “S, my name is Sacha; I’m going on a picnic, and I’m bringing Strawberries.”

But those fruits were not strawberries. I had my first of the real thing on the side of the road in Sonoma Valley, California. It was petite, plump, and deep red, and its soft flesh squished easily between my fingers. The small plot of land wasn’t one of the vast strawberry wastelands of Salinas, where workers toil with no reward. There was just a hard-working family, a field, and well-treated workers. Sun-tanned hands passed the quart of California berries toward me, and I bashfully traded the hand’s owner some rumpled bills out of my own pale, smooth hands for the sweet bounty. She very much was her hands—those hands told a story of hard work and hot sun, and mine had nothing to show but sloth and my cold-weather roots.

I ate the berries, all the berries, right there in minutes. Ruby-red from edge to center, their juices ran down my mouth, staining my lips, my chin, my hands, my clothes. Nope; if this was a Strawberry, I had never previously had one. Continue reading →

My dad hates getting up early in the morning. If left alone, he’d probably sleep until 11am every day. But he did it. He did it every damn morning of my childhood, weekends too. Rising to darkness, he’d shower, iron his shirt and slacks (my father can press clothes with a tailor’s precision) dress himself, eat, and get out the door to bake the bread that fed our family—all in a half hour.

I’d rise about an hour later, but I felt his presence every morning in the steamy bathroom that trapped the smell of the cologne he’s worn for 30 years, the light hum of the voices on the morning news he’d left on in the other room, and, without fail, from the sight of the crumb-filled, half-finished Tetley tea that sat on his side of the kitchen table.

It’s curious that my dad drank Tetley in the morning (and still does). Persian, he comes from a tea culture. Tea is the national drink for a reason: Iran’s coastal climate and topography are perfect for tea cultivation, and Iranians drink tea after every meal. The tea is often brewed in glass pots with a cylindrical infuser and poured into small, slender, filigreed glasses. An Iranian tea set is quite the vision, the ceremony of drinking from it an aesthetician’s wet dream. The glasses seem to deliver a cautionary message: The hot glass will scorch your fingertips if you drink the tea when it is too hot for its flavor to be appreciated. The aroma of Iranian black tea is nothing like stateside tea, and the ritual surrounding drinking it brings together families, friends, and strangers. When there is tea, there are no divides; Iranian Muslims and Jews sip together in the tea houses that are found on every corner (though any divides are sensationalized anyway). Place a lump of pure cane sugar on your tongue, sip, close your eyes, breathe, let the marijuana-like high roll over you, and repeat—this is how Persian tea should be enjoyed. Drink it in the summer, no matter the temperature; drink it in the winter to thaw chilled bones. Drink it with rock candy (the confection originated in Iran, not at seaside American candy shops); swirl your crystal-laden stick in the warm amber liquid and let it melt. Drink it with rose-scented pistachio nougat. Continue reading →

I’m falling asleep as I type this. I’m looking at words appear on the screen and feeling fingers tapping but not quite understanding the force that moves them. At the end of the day, my fingers are bloated so they fall with more weight than normal on the keys. I’m blasting wordless electronic music; it’s raucous enough to keep me from taking a nosedive into the keyboard but it doesn’t distract me.Continue reading →

I stared at her as she stood in the locker room and moved her hands slowly up and down her perfectly flat, milky-white abdomen from under her black camisole. The top’s low back showed off strong back muscles and its spaghetti straps sat snuggly on pulled-back shoulders that extended into skinny, lean arms. Tight, flared, floor-length spandex covered endless legs. She had finished working out, but you wouldn’t know. There was no rose to her cheeks or shine to her skin, and her blonde pixie cut—soft not blunt—sat untossled on her head, framing her heart-shaped face with perfect waves. She’s a dancer. I don’t know her beyond the blonde and the pale and the black. But I know her.

I know her because I was her. Well, a brunette her. Though likely six to seven years my senior, she is my younger self before illness, fatigue, and injury diminished the place of the art and the sport in my life, aged my limbs and heart, bloated my face. I’m not sure if the trance she put me in was heartbreaking or uplifting. I’m still the bendy-twisty creature with decent balance and an ear for a beat. But I can no longer call myself a dancer—I’m just one who dances. Dancer Lady’s too old to be in a company. She may be a teacher. I don’t know. But she’s a studio rat of some kind. She scurries to the gym on her rare days off to crosstrain, to maintain her strength and stamina. She straddles the equipment with such grace, staring dead-faced ahead and never tiring.Continue reading →

My hair is healthy enough, but it doesn’t shine. My skin doesn’t glow; in fact, it’s craterous in places, like my mother’s. I lack energy, and my relatively small frame always feels heavy, weighed down by something intangible. I fall asleep at inappropriate times, and yet I don’t sleep at all. I feel ill more days than I feel OK, and I cannot count my doctors on two hands. I don’t absorb nutrients.

So, like bad lovers from my younger years, plants have given me nothing, but I’m still attracted to them. Vegetables—when thoughtfully prepared—are my favorite food group. Did you just unsubscribe?

I spend a lot of time thinking about what Americans eat—how our incomes force us to eat, where our food comes from and who gets it from field to plate, how folks shame fat but not sugar, how society demonizes and diminishes intolerances, how food can heal. I choose not to tackle those questions here, because my central agenda is to have no agenda. But these are the issues that sometimes cross my mind when my fork hits the plate. (Sometimes I’m too busy stuffing my big, hungry face.) And I’m certainly opinionated about them. Lucky for me, vegetable-forward cuisine is hot right now, and restaurant chefs are using vegetables in bold new ways and putting them in the center of the plate.

I have writer’s block. I have too much on my mind to be creative, so whatever I write here to take up space would be a bunch of feathery BS. No one likes feathery BS.

I don’t think writer’s block is all bad—it gives me the headspace to create other things—but I’m not going to go too far into it since I’m not really a Writer writer.

I do still want to share this recipe for Pistachio Baci di Dama, though, for three reasons: 1. I’m sick of waiting for the words to come back. 2. I saw a two-pack of them being sold at Hell on Earth (Trader Joe’s, for the uninitiated), so I feel a trend coming on and I want to beat it. 3. Baci di Dama means “lady’s kisses” in Italian, and posting the recipe any closer to Valentine’s Day would be way too cute. 729 Layers, Inc. doesn’t tolerate treacle.

I was in Brittany once, but I can’t tell you too much about it. My French host family took me to Vannes, a commune in the Morbihan department, after a very early sweat-and-alcohol-soaked morning with my “sister” Aurélie and her friends at the discothèque. I was 16 years old.

The family must have told me where we were going, but even though the Visine made me look awake, I most certainly was not. And so, I didn’t know where we were until I saw the region’s reed-roofed houses out the car window. I failed to take in the scenery; my main focus was trying not to vom all over the back seat. That would have been just too horrifically American. The drive wasn’t long—I’d say about an hour and a half from the family’s home in the Haye-Fouassière commune of the Loire-Atlantique. (In fact, the Loire-Atlantique was a Breton territory pre-Vichy France.) But it was very uncomfortable, as I undoubtably smelled like a combination of some Jacques-ass’s armpits and the inside of the thong that I found stuck to my shoe as I walked out of the club hours earlier.

Brittany was so wonderfully Brittany that it was almost a parody of itself. We walked down Vannes center’s cobblestone streets, which were lined with medieval, wood-paneled buildings and dotted with vendors skillfully flipping lacy buckwheat crêpes. When we’d arrived, like clockwork, the bagadoù, a traditional Breton band of bagpipers, marched through the square, and children, playing tag or swinging wooden yo-yos, squealed and ran to the side to allow for their procession. It felt a lot like that scene from my favorite of the 1970s Rankin-Bass stop-motion TV Christmas movies, Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, in which the children playing in the streets scurry away to allow for the Burgermeister’s passing, except the scene in Brittany was much happier and less German.

My relationship with religion is complicated because it’s so simple. I have none. My mother is “Catholic”; my father is “Muslim.” Both believe in god. They both prey to him nightly for my health and well being, though they likely do it in two different languages. They don’t do anything else for him/her/it, so I’m not sure he/she/it will answer. I don’t think I believe in god, but I keep myself in the agnostic category, because I can’t know everything. I can know, however, that I believe in science and that people are picking up guns to maim on the regular. My mother doesn’t seem bothered by my disbelief; my father does, but it’s fine.

My parents come from a generation when it was common to self-identify as the faith you were born into, so just as my mother is French-Canadian, she is Catholic; just as my father is Iranian, he is Muslim. My maternal grandparents are staunch Catholics; they haven’t been to church in 30 years. Still, they probably resent that I wasn’t stripped and dunked in water by an old dude in front of an audience, though I suppose I could do that any night of the week if I choose to. I respect the practice, but it certainly doesn’t feel right to do it for the sake of doing it.